What did you say? You want to see how quickly you can turn a company with a market cap of $44 Billion into a heaping pile of horse manure? Well if that’s the case they by all means go ahead and announce that you’re going to begin charging people a monthly fee to read what has become a cesspool of racist, sexist, and homophobic tweets in the name of “free speech”.
Now that I got that off my chest, in other completely unrelated news (my layers made me say that) Elon Musk announced that X would be “moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system” in order to combat “vast armies of bots.”
There has been a very interesting concept of charging micro-fees to read content on the internet for a while. A couple of cryptocurrencies including Reddcoin and Brave (I think I own both, but can’t remember my wallet’s seed phrase anymore). But if you charge a monthly fee to ready X then the vast majority of people will just stop reading it. I’ll grant you bot activity would also probably drop down to 0, but that’s like saying crime will be non-existent if only there weren’t any humans around anymore. On the flip side of the equation if you charge users to post, then again the vast majority of them would stop paying, and you’d have dramatically less content for people to read even if they are paying for a subscription which now has diminishing returns. It’s a vicious cycle to the bottom, but again if your goal is to destroy shareholder value by all means go for it.
Musk says Twitter, now X, is moving to subscription fees and has 550 million users